Patrick McFadden: My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions will have more to say later in the debate about our plans to ease unemployment and get people back to work, but my hon. Friend the Member for High Peak (Tom Levitt) is right that we must not abandon the unemployed and must do everything we can to support employment in the economy.
	I return to the question of the stimulus and when it should be withdrawn. The former member of the Monetary Policy Committee, Professor David Blanchflower, said:
	"If spending cuts are made too early and the monetary and fiscal stimuli are withdrawn, unemployment could easily reach 4usb million."
	Just a few weeks ago the director general of the CBI said:
	"The economy is too fragile right now for massive cuts in public spending."
	On the question of employment just raised by my hon. Friend, Kevin Green from the Recruitment and Employment Confederation, when asked about the fiscal stimulus last month, said:
	"We certainly don't want it to be switched off early. We actually need it to continue."
	Yet a premature end to the fiscal stimulus is precisely what the Opposition are advocating. The Leader of the Opposition said in his party conference speech:
	"The longer we leave it, the worse it will be for all of us."
	But the fact is that in the present economic situation, that is not true. His attack on big government is driving him and his party to an economic stance that endangers the recovery and threatens to choke it off before it has been properly established. That is what happened in Japan in the 1990s, with the result that the downturn there lasted years and impacted even more severely on debt levels. The judgment failures that led the Conservatives to make the wrong judgments during the recession are being repeated, just as we see fragile signs of recovery.